you may be representing some french element, but you are not representing the party. if you want to get back in power, you might want to represent your people. mr. palmer: we are going to have some more time to speak with secretary brad raffensperger, but we want you to know that we want your questions, so keep thinking of those, and just to remind those online, you can either email or you can use the #aeielections on x or twitter. so let me come back to, we were talking to technology earlier, and you mentioned audits. people talk about audits, and it is one way you might give people security, but the machinery works, the account has gone right, that you double check things essentially. talk a little bit about the auditing process, what you do now, and what you would like to see in terms of auditing to give people the sense that those votes that they feel out, that

they scan, that somehow we know that they have a sort of second check on them, that they are going in as cast. sec. raffensperger: we have an audit right now, the counties do a lot of the work. a statewide audit of looking at the ballot images. all of the ballots are scanned. we have a ballot images. we will run those through a check all the races with an organization called enhanced voting. the machines did not flip the vote because of the human readable text, but they also verify the results.

morning, 155 counties. you said bob and mary go right to this race, bob is at 55, you know, mary got 45, now they are going to do the audit. if it comes in at 54.9 versus 55.0, you know you are right on the numbers. if all of a sudden it is something that does not work, that is what happened when the county started sending this information, there are actually a few counties they were catching their mistakes, we had some test data and i got in here because the numbers were not lining up, and we pulled them out, so that is the other damage. he cleans up your data before you even begin the audit process.

so we have that done, and we will be reporting back to everyone in america, "here's what the results were," and the one we are doing state wide is the presidential race, we know 125,000 and president trump won the state by, but we had to do our due diligence to come back to all the voters, both sides of the aisle, everyone, to say here's what it was. >> so basically first machines are commentating it out. you have the machines take a picture so you can see there it is, but you also have the paper ballots, some people are worried, paper ballots, and auditing allows you to compare some of these things to a certain number, defending on the race, a certain number just make sure that is a good mash-up. sec. raffensperger: and that is what we audit, we audit the paper ballots. we are actually auditing your physical ballot, pulled out of the sack come and you have to get a certain number from this precinct and different precincts, and then you are adding it up and putting the two

sides and a hand count on that also. mr. palmer: mr. secretary, postelection, one of the things coming out in the transition period is efficiency and government, federal government agencies are involved in elections, they are also federal funds that occasionally congress appropriates the states. how should congress come up with the new congress and the new president elect, how should the congress and the president approached federal funding of elections for the state to assist? sec. raffensperger: we actually managed without any federal funding, and i believe constitutionally the states can manage. but if the government wants to have a grant program, they can use carrots and sticks. everyone will be part of a multistate organization, because it cost money, everyone gets a grant for that, and you make sure it covers the smaller

states. california is probably a flat fee, whatever it is. the state i could not afford it would get 500,000 or $1 million, whatever that needs to be, i think that would be helpful for the states. california has a bigger budget, because they have a lot more people, so i don't think we need to ramp it up. i don't think it needs to be a flat fee, a flat grant, just help with the costs. mr. palmer: carrots and sticks. ok. you expressed you might use federal funding if they came the right way, but what would you say about private funding? we had private funding in the 2020 election. there was some kind of mercy on it where are you in private funding? sec. raffensperger: i oppose. i don't think private organizations should be weighing in. even with the most pure of intentions, it does not lend itself to voter trust, and we

have to be honest where we are right now, even though trump got the electoral vote, popular vote, still not getting over 60%, so they are still close. there's not a lot of trust on both sides of the aisle. we have to make sure there's processes in place, so the matter what the results are, you may not like them, but you say, that was fair. we have good refs, and they are calling balls and strikes. >> one of the big issues is both in georgia and arizona, multiple bomb hoaxes. you called out the russians for that. there were some questions about, where that information come from? what happened with that, and have you received any other information on that? sec. raffensperger: yes. we knew pretty early on come on the bottom of the sheet, email,

it had cyrillic lettering, which would come from russia or one of the other folks that came out with that. so we tagged the russians with it and we were talking to the fence. we were a little slow to get that out there, but we established it was a hoax, you know, threat, so you keep on voting. in all but four or five precincts did. and then about 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon, the fbi said there was a rush of peace. we also had an attack a few weeks earlier, 420,000 hits, and that also came from the russians. that was identified with our federal partners. we notified it, so we just put in an interface that said, you know, i am not a robot, i am a human, and it went down real quick. but they have been really active

right now. >> is a concern income in my memory is just going, but -- is it concerning, and my memory is just going, but it is concerning about the bomb threats, do they close down the police right for an hour or so, to see if there is actually a threat, and then they have to extend the time of the pulling pace? -- place? sec. raffensperger: right. mr. palmer: i don't recall that extent of destruction. what are your thoughts? sec. raffensperger: we had over 30 bomb threats, 60, 70 statewide, and we identified it, we put it out very quickly, and law enforcement, the county sheriff's, police departments, were saying we could keep on voting. a few of the precinct, the police officer came, well, what do you want us to do? we said, well, can you bring in the dogs to sweep the area? that is why we had a 20-minute, 30-minute, and one was up to 50-minute wait, so those

precincts stay open later. fortunately, it was not 60 different precincts paid our whole goal was to get those results uploaded really quick, because that is vote of confidence that we have tried so hard to try and reestablish. mr. fortier: one more along those lines, georgia was hit as well, north carolina and florida, by hurricanes, because the some damage. i would like to hear a little bit about how georgia recovered come in the election sense. we talked to north carolina, florida, and the podcast recently, but let's think about less notice, something happening on election day like these bomb threats or, god forbid, something more real. how does the secretary of state's office prepare for, think about what is in the law that allows for sort of dealing with real, on the ground in emergencies, if it really came to that? sec. raffensperger: fortunately, welcome it is a fact, but hurricane has never hit the

weekend before. governor kemp, he had a hurricane that came through, so he had to deal with that. 2020 22, we had a tornado that came through south georgia, down near the savannah area. we had a little trailer with two voting machines in it, so we set that up at that precinct to get that back up and running. in this case, we had about 50 counties that were hit hard. the hurricane came through on a friday. by saturday, we were actually only talking to the georgia emergency management agency, which is our state agency. government can't basically -- kemp basically in power head of gema, give him whatever he needs, and do an assessment. we send out a checklist ahead of the hurricane. don't fill it out now can tell us what happened afterwards.

so they were filling out all the things they had so we can identify very clearly which precincts had to be moved. we got our power back up, we had local generators, we had starlink, every single aspect we could so we could actually get ready to go. i visited about 11 counties with governor kemp, and we had internet, the county sheriff's office, and the election director, i forget which county it was, i went over and shook her hand, and the reason she was there and she had 11 people she had to get on the voter list because the applications had come into and there was internet there, so she was working at the job. so that is the american spirit. you should feel good about being un-american, because we have a great country were great people are hard-working, and they contribute to free, fair, and fast elections. mr. palmer: well, the point of elections is to hear from the people, and now we are going to hear from the people.

you've been preparing questions. if you raise your hand, wait for the mic to come to you, identify yourself, and ask your questions. i think we will go right here. the mic is right behind you. jack: my name is jack, and i'm here at aei. from my home state, the pennsylvania recount and the senate race, i though that is sort of the obvious question. sec. raffensperger: election the nile needs to stop. people need to do their job. it is as simple as that if we don't follow the constitution, we know of a country. this country is built on the rule of law. he needs to stop. mr. fortier: ok, we are going to look to our left. i'm sorry come here come and we are also going to go online. yes, right here.

>> with the election being out of the way now, i know it is over, but i was wondering what other things you are looking for in your department to increase, like, voter efficiency for the next may primary election you have. sec. raffensperger: there are probably a few tweaks. what we had is some of the counties at the last moment, so we are going to open up our office on saturday. they made that announcement on friday, to accept absentee ballots. and i don't like last-minute changes. gwinnett county did it also, but they announced it back in july, plenty of time for everyone to understand, oh, they are going to be open. the people who needed to know that were republican party observers, democrat observers, and our investigators. this happens on friday, so the republican that favors democrats, independents, and our investors, they were still in town and

available. we got them all covered, but i think that needs to be setting up, one, you need to do that, and whatever that period is, back it up 30, 45, or 60 days, but a certain period of time. so i will be working on the general assembly on that. we also introduced sb-202, that we want to do away with out of precinct voting on election day. and the reason we want to make sure everyone has the vote in precinct is we found one of the candidates was saying, vote anywhere, it does now matters, but all that matters is voting for her at the top of the ticket. when you think about it, that means you would be disenfranchised for all the other was if you show up at the wrong location. we would not have built out precinct voting on election day. the general assembly changed and

set up to 5:00 p.m. as soon as we had a couple of precincts in focus that work open late because of the bomb threats, people said oh, that means everyone go and vote at these four precinct. no, it does not mean that. if you don't have any out of precinct voting, we won't have that issue. and all of a sudden, you have some crafty lawyer from the side with, you know, other crafty lawyers on the other going for a judge, you know, two minutes before midnight. i'm just trying to clear it out, so everyone knows what the rules are before hand. a touchdown for six points, we don't change the rules once we start the game. >> to follow-up on that, looking ahead to maybe the next election in the next year or two, what would you like to see, even after you are no longer secretary of state, what is the big thing you would like to see in voting that will be different and five or 10 years that you don't see today? sec. raffensperger: we are not

ready for internet voting, so i'm not going to go there. that is 2030 or whenever someone like elon musk and all these other really smart people can figure out how to make that secure, so you feel comfortable about your ballot. when we look at military ballots, we have that window by federal law that we have to accept those up through friday. why is that? they are overseas. but some of the states already are using a form of electronic return their ballot, so i think that is something we might want to look at. end of the is 7:00 p.m. our time, 7:00 p.m. on tuesday. i think indiana is 6:00 p.m. all ballots have to be in at a certain point. i don't believe any ballots, absentee or any other ballots, should be coming in after, but we have to make sure for our overseas military ballots, that they have a process that we can have those in there. that would be a big lift to the

m, and i think it would be great. mr. fortier: jalen, using that as a lead-in, should we go to our friends on the internet that are asking questions? >> yes, so we had a question about, that we addressed earlier about how can congress balance its interests in ensuring fair, secure, and quick elections while also respecting the federalism issue? sec. raffensperger: i think what georgia has shown as you can have really strong turnout. we had 5.3 million people show up out of 7.2 million active voters. if you divide that outcome it is over 70%. that is our highest turnout ever. with sb-202, cajuns came down to georgia, came back to georgia, and said it would be jim crow 2.0. mr. fortier: the all-star game is coming back, right? sec. raffensperger: it is coming

back. let's not forget we had a good turnout, 2020, 2022 for gubernatorial, 2024 for presidential. we have shown that voter id works. i think that is important. everything we've done in our model is something really everyone could embrace. utah, which is a republican state, i'm not a fan of that, it works and some of the western states. but i think that what works the best is making sure you have a clean voter list. if you don't clean up your voter list and you start mailing out a hot ballot that has not been requested and it is going to someone's old address, and yet over four years, what percentage of the voters have already move? it is 11% a year. what is that percentage over four years? i'm sure someone here is pretty good with math, and they can figure that one out. that leads to voters not trusting what is going on, and that is very dangerous in a

pluralistic, you know, democratic society like we have right now. we want everyone to feel confident about the process. mr. palmer: just to follow-up, you mentioned the multistate organization that shares some data. this is really related to the national voter registration act. post-election, there have been complaints on the left and the right, pre-election come on the effectiveness of the nvra, after 30 some years. is there an opportunity for the congress to modify that? how were they work together on that? sec. raffensperger: i think if you are part of an organization that is updating your voter lists objectively, not subjectively, but i think you be able to update your voter list up until the same period of time when you have to put people on the list. so if you have to put people on the last 30 days before an election, you should be able to also remove those voters, if you got that information objectively through an organization, because they don't live in georgia

anymore. they actually have moved to kansas. so, you know, those are the objective criteria. it is tough to argue the facts. and as soon as you and i get subjective about something, then it is your opinion, my opinion. so to deal with the facts would help. we need to codify it based on objective criteria. mr. fortier: so, just following up, so the nvra was 30 something years ago, where everything was by mail, and now it is 2024, about to be 2025. how can technology improve the nvra? have you thought about that, and what can we do as election professionals to improve that process? because it seems to me like we are stuck back in the 1990's, and it is 2025. sec. raffensperger: i think electronic records. i think also all the drivers records are updated on a national basis, and i think that

is part of what we are doing. people update their drivers license when they are supposed to come up with a percentage that don't is very small. i think that is a good thing for your power bill, whatever you want to do, they want to see a local address. i think that needs to be incorporated into that. >> ok, we are going to go back, we will go here in the front. mark: i was wondering what was going through your mind when president trump asked you to find those additional votes, and how did that conversation happened to be tape? sec. raffensperger: well, when president trump called me four years ago, i had already done all the checking, so i pretty much knew those were the results. we could quibble over the numbers, two dead people, tend dead people, but we knew there were not thousands of dead

people. we knew there were not under age voters. it is really knowing the data, and that is very important, to have systems in place that you can relate, you know, drill down and get answers for everything. because people can say whatever they want to out on the internet, but then you have to be able to back it up with data. and that is why we do -- we also did an audit. we had $5 million back in 2020, where we actually hand counted all 5 million ballots. donald j. trump, biden, or the libertarian -- i forget that name. [laughter] they did not get too many. but we did verify what the results were, and as we went through the audit process, we found a couple counties had some issues. one of them was a county that had issues on 2020. they were the county that reported themselves the fastest this year. they have done a 180. we did not really talk about that. one of the things we put into

the state law >> they can't just say we do whatever we want. have accountability review board so if youms. up an election, you probably have a consent agreement you'll sign to settle otherwise you have half $1 million in fines. all of a sudden you have experts going in and monitoring your next elections. and they are also coming along beside you to see how you're doing these processes, so how you can improve your processes. all of the monitoring we just checked, so we knew that's where we were. i was at home with my wife, tricia. it was the day after the holiday. i guess he was up in the white house with a whole bunch of people in his office. just trying to figure out where they stood and where we were in

georgia. just wanted to let him know i checked everything out. hopefully, history shows that i was respectful. one thing i would say, even if you don't agree with the people politically, on the other side of the aisle, i served in the house we were always respectful of each other. i think that is something we have lost and need to reclaim. that we can disagree about policies. ——>> will go here. >> hi, i think a common argument against requiring photo id is that it's too expensive for people don't have time and saying that photo id is discriminatory in a way. what is your response to that and do you think georgia and other states to make it easier to obtain a photo id? >> we all have the same amount

of hours each week. and if you can find the time, i bet you your friends can do. number two, in georgia we passed photo id and we also offered seven other forms of identification. military id. if you don't have any of those other identifications, the state of georgia will supply one to you for free of charge. so you can use that as an identification card. >> ok, we look over here. mic is coming here. >> hi, carrie levine from op. thank you for doing this. i was interested in when you talk about the need to improve the cleaning of loading lists. and for all of the states to share information more effectively. i'm wondering if you talk about the role online voter registration plays in letting states effectively manage their lists. there are still eight states i don't have it, so i am

interested. in texas the largest. >> we have a lot of online voter registration. and it really makes it easy to vote and verify who they are and also what they want to change, if they've moved to another part of the state, they can update their voter list. we think it's very important. it allows you to have a cleaner list. we've also added a way to deactivate your registration when you move out of state. when we moved to virginia 40 someone years ago down to georgia, i never thought about getting back to virginia. so how many years ice in the last year. but it's really helpful people have that opportunity. you didn't let the realtors know about that so we do real estate closing and that says that hey you can do this. it's all voluntary but you follow the same protocols that five or seven states also have.

we think that is really helpful that you have a clean, updated list. >> did you take the secretary off the list when you're running in elections for virginia? >> minute one. >> more serious follow—up, you we mentioned online registration. you also have a form of automatic registration that can mean different things in different states. give a quick sense of what you do that gets people on more efficiently or automatically. >> with so—called loader voter, you have a choice. you could be opt in or opt out. so opt in means, yes, please register me. i have been wanting to vote ever since i turned 18. or i just moved to georgia yes, i want to vote. or opt out means, please do not register me. i don't want to be registered. so we are in opt out state. so when i got elected, i'm a conservative republican. i talked to our general counsel

and said where republican state, or wait. he said yeah? i said we should be opt out rather than often. he said the advantage of opt out is that we have more people registered to vote. and when they do that and 99 % of our people registered with the government of driver services to a citizenship verification to make sure they are not felons under sentence. they just verified all of the qualifications are being met as on the they do a lot of the heavy lifting for us. but if you have opt up, people update your drivers license so they moved to clark county to oconee county, then they are going to change their driver's license number and we will find out about their voter records so our list really cleaner that way. wow i see why you did that. so i got the understanding of why that is.

the other choice, but in georgia we don't actually opt out, probably since day one and has worked well for us. what i understand from that perspective then i see why make sense because i like to see when other people moved to another part of the state and we will have cleaner lists. >> hi secretary ravens burger. ——we got into a bit of a feisty discussion with the u.s. postal service before the elections about them sort of working to address some of the concerns we had, working harder to do that. and i know that georgia is one of the states where they had the facility that was new because it was consolidated. and i wonder how the u.s. postal service and the

performing as far as you are concerned in georgia. i will be asking the other states too, but since you're here i thought i would ask you. >> the national association of secretaries of state wrote a letter to the postmaster general and we received response in 24 hours. maybe 48, but it was quick, with a full commitment. by and large, we did see a noticeable improvement for the fall election. but that is one of my concerns about a male in—state. you don't have a dependable mail service, you need a system that has a dependable mail service than you've built a system to fail. you want to build a system that the election management professionals can ask successful in the counties and the voters can feel good about. so they do not fix the mail, i just think that more people are going to say we need to just have more early voting, like georgia and other states do so have an opportunity to vote.

and then you'll have that five % that will want to vote by mail. because they have been a mess for several years now and it's about time they get it fixed. perhaps that's on the list, the doge team. >> maybe. >> ok we will go over here. >> hi, i'm daniel shawcross from baylor university in waco, texas. so i think the worst thing to see in voting time is to see a long line when you are on your lunch break. so something i really piqued my interest was that use on average time of three minutes, i think while waiting to go vote. so i'm curious if you can expound upon how you were able to do that. >> well we put into state law, but we also worked with the counties. we look at how many people do you have your precinct, how many machines do you have how many voters can

get to those machines. and then we gave them a great. greenlight, you are good, yellow light, it depends on how many people show up at one time. then a red light, this will not work. so we helped cut precinct in half and made things more efficient. we worked with the data analytics on that, jessica get the right sized precincts. that's on election day. on early voting, we had 17 days. we can't really control it because that's about the vote center. people loaded up at lunchtime and that was that. but i'm election day, we already know who has voted so we can be prepared for the people who are left to vote. and we make sure to build an effective safety of two at least so even if we had a peak at 10, 12 and 5 to at ——to the cause of paul's we can control it. it picks it up, and then rinse back down.

——we hold counties accountable and they are doing a great job. >> this may also be an argument like you might want to elect an engineer because you understand the processes, there's a formula on the wall. the laws that are all about gi >> it's high school math, trust me. it's two per hour, how many hours, what's the number ? >> we have time for one more question right in the front. mic is coming here. >> hi, i'm a journalist from norway mr. secretary. you talk a lot about motor trust. ——voter tr do you believe there's a lot of cheating out there? >> by and large no. but7 ——buyt when you cannot quantify something, it's really important that you

do everything you can to squeeze out any inaccuracies. in fact, at least mouse talking to a couple of folks about really close races. you can have phrases that are decided by less than 50 people. it may not be present but something more local. you got the judge's race in north carolina that is under 50. >> 21 the last time i checked, out of 5 million voters. >> so when we did our citizenship verification, we found 20 noncitizens that were on the voter polls. we took them off, it's a violation of state laws so we send their names to for prosecution. but what if that was in election for state judge and i lost 12 people on there ? what if we had double voting? where

someone voted in one state and in your state. that's why when you get to be very competitive, you have to be really accurate. and that's what we face in the year 2000. 400, 450 votes total out of the state at the time of 20 million people. that was extremely close. so that's why it's really important to squeeze everything as accurate as possible. we know people pathway up to the day of elections, things like that. you just have to get as accurate as possible and not say " well that's good enough". because the voters have to be able to trust at the end of the day, to hold society together. >> secretary reference berger.——he's had a couple of controversial election cycles before him. linda thank you for your service to the country and for being here today.

>> well thank you. thank you. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> discuss the latest issues in

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